NHTSA Proposes Anti-Ejection Regulations
Reprinted from The Safety Record, Volume 6, Issue 6, December 2009
WASHINGTON D.C. – At least a year past a Congressional deadline and several years behind its own schedule, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has proposed a new ejection-mitigation standard that would compel automakers to improve their side airbag designs to fully cover up to three rows of passengers and – perhaps – install advanced glazing.
The proposal would establish a new Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard 226 – Ejection Mitigation. The standard would apply to the side windows next to the first three rows of seats in motor vehicles with a gross vehicle weight rating of 10,000 pounds or less. The performance-based standard would institute a compliance test in which an impactor would be propelled from inside a test vehicle toward the windows. The ejection mitigation system would have to prevent the impactor – based on the mass imposed by a 50th percentile male’s upper torso on the window opening – from moving more than a specified distance beyond the plane of the window. Each side window would be impacted at up to four locations around its perimeter at two time intervals following deployment, to ensure that the airbags remain deployed for the beginning and end stages of a rollover.
According to the NPRM, the intention of the test is to:
“mitigate ejections in different types of rollover and side impact crashes involving different occupant kinematics. The test has been designed to represent the dynamic rollover event. The mass of the impactor, 18 kilograms (kg) (40 lb), in combination with the impact speed discussed below, has sufficient kinetic energy to assure that the ejection mitigation countermeasure is able to protect a far-reaching population of people in real world crashes.”
Don Friedman, inventor of the Jordan Rollover System, a repeatable dynamic rollover test, said that the proposal was good – as far as it went.
“It’s not a dynamic test, but it’s consistent with the plans they had laid out,” Friedman said. “And it is consistent with the roof crush standard in that they are proceeding with a simulated static test. It will have useful consequences that will hopefully be supplanted by a dynamic test in the NCAP which will deal with ejection and roof crush issue.”
This rulemaking comes on the heels of the 2007 upgrade to the FMVSS 214 side-impact pole test, which, in effect, mandated the use of side air curtains to prevent head injuries in side impacts. The agency predicts that manufacturers will meet this new proposed performance requirement by making existing side impact air bag curtains larger and able to stay inflated longer. The agency based the test on computer modeling showing that ejections can occur early and late in the rollover event. Under the proposed test, the impactor would strike the targets at two impact speeds and at two different points in time after the side curtain air bag deployed, to ensure that the curtains retain the occupant through all the stages of a rollover.
Under the NPRM, NHTSA could request that manufacturers describe the conditions under which the ejection mitigation air bags will deploy.
“We do not believe conditions need to be specified in the standard dictating when the sensors should deploy; field data indicate that rollover sensors are deploying when they should in the real world,” the agency said.
The ejection mitigation rulemaking was mandated under the Safe, Accountable, Flexible, Efficient Transportation Equity Act: A Legacy for Users, the massive transportation bill of 2005. NHTSA was to have issued a final ejection mitigation rule by September 1, 2009, when SAFETEA-LU’s funding expired. The rulemaking was to be part of a broader initiative to reduce rollover crashes and the associated deaths and injuries.
The agency multi-pronged approach included a new rule mandating electronic stability control to improve rollover crash avoidance and a contentious upgrade to the roof crush standard. SAFETEA-LU’s Section 10301 directed NHTSA to complete a rulemaking to reduce complete and partial ejections. The agency’s early planning documents show that it expected to propose occupant containment performance requirement for side windows by 2006.
NHTSA has been studying advanced glazing as an ejection countermeasure since 1995, when it published “Ejection Mitigation Using Advanced Glazings: A Status Report.” The agency issued a second glazing report in 1999 and the following year published an Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking on anti-ejection glazing. But in 2001, the agency reversed itself. It issued a third report downplaying the benefits of anti-ejection glazing and in 2002 terminated the rulemaking, saying that “advanced glazing appeared to increase the risk of neck injury by producing higher neck shear loads and neck moments than impacts into tempered side glazing.” The agency also turned in high estimates for requiring automakers to install such glazing in front side windows ranging from more than $800 million to over $1.3 billion.
Advanced glazing may rise from the regulatory dead under this proposal. The agency drafted the test procedure to encourage the use of advanced laminated glazing in fixed and in moveable windows in addition to or in lieu of the side curtain air bag. Memphis attorney Patrick Ardis, who has been espousing the advantages of laminated glazing for years and has litigated civil suits that involve ejection, says that automakers should opt to use both, because both are necessary to complete the occupant protection system.
“It’s only about 40 years too late,” says Ardis. “The bottom line is that none of the domestic car manufacturers have had to evaluate the real world performance of side windows or any other fixed windows. All they’ve done is a series of drop tests – tests that go back to the1930s. So far, there’s been this giant disconnect between a 1930s test and horrible performance in the real-world.”
In the agency’s tests, the glazing was pre-broken to simulate the likely condition of glazing in a rollover. Tests of vehicles with advanced glazing resulted in an average 51 mm reduction in impactor displacement across the target locations. In other words, an ejection mitigation window curtain plus advanced glazing resulted in the least displacement of the headform. To encourage manufacturers to enhance ejection mitigation curtains with advanced glazing, the NPRM proposed to allow windows of advanced laminated glazing to be in position, but pre-broken to reproduce the state of glazing in an actual rollover crash.
Attorney Jim Gilbert, who tried the nation’s first windshield pop-out case in the mid-1980s, and a leading specialist in rollover litigation, says that the proposal still constitutes an unnecessary delay. Gilbert’s eventual appellate court victory over an international aftermarket windshield replacement company accused of substandard installation practices led to an industry-wide change. But Gilbert, of the Arvada, Colorado-based Gilbert, Ollanick & Komyatte P.C., hasn’t seen OE manufacturers improve their glazing at all.
“Manufacturers aren’t going to start making improvements unless someone tells them they have to and that some one is either a jury or the government,” Gilbert said.
But he decried the pace of the proposed phase-in, in which manufacturers would be required to have 20 percent of their fleets compliant by September 2014, with full implementation by 2017.
“Twenty percent is already being done,” he said. “Sensors and side curtains have been around since the 1990s. Why aren’t they acknowledging the facts – that this is available. It seems like an unreasonable delay after the decades of delay in the industry.”
The agency is accepting comments on this proposal through January.